Re: tiny improvement to config(8)

[Chris Pressey <cpressey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sat, 6 Mar 2004 17:01:12 -0800 (PST)
Matthew Dillon <dillon@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> 
> :'lo all,
> :
> :The attached patch makes an ever-so-tiny improvement to config(8):
> :it adds a -q ("quiet") flag which suppresses reminder messages.
> :
> :The idea is that the message "Don't forget to do a ``make depend''"
> is:(at best) redundant and (at worst) confusing, when using the "new"
> :kernel building method (which is virtually standard nowadays.)
> :
> :To try it, you can run
> :
> :  make buildkernel KERNCONF=FOO CONFIGARGS="-q"
> :
> :This is working fine for me, and the patch is so simple, I am fairly
> :confident there are no errors in it.
> 
>     Well... it's just like a line or two of output that is being saved
>     here, and we can't build the -q option into the Makefile's without
>     creating a chicken-and-egg problem (minor, but unnecessarily
>     annoying).
> 
>     How about if we were to simply remove the 'Don't forget to do ...'
>     stuff entirely?  So many things already break when one tries to do
>     manual config/builds that most people are (should be) using
>     'buildkernel', or manually CDing into an already existant
>     /usr/obj/usr/src/sys/BLAH and just typing 'make' when they are
>     doing incremental development. So there isn't much point outputing
>     the warning anymore.
> 
> 						-Matt

Personally I'm all for that.  I guess I was thinking too much about
backwards compatibility and not enough about bootstrapping.

This does raise the question of how far you are willing to let backwards
compatibility go - if it's "all the way" (on the theory that anyone who
has written a script that expects a certain output from config wouldn't
typically expect that script to be easily ported to a new OS anyway),
there are quite a few other aspects of config that could be cleaned up. 
Especially the way it reports errors (sometimes to stdout, sometimes to
stderr, sometimes with err, sometimes just with printf.)  I'd be happy
to take this on :)

-Chris